Erik Wilde on Services and APIs

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The Death of Flash

browsing the web with the iphone is an interesting experience. it certainly is nice to be able to access the web from anywhere, and the interface with the rotating display and the zoom feature makes many web pages surprisingly useful (even though most of them contain just too much text). naturally, some of the web 2.0 sites are completely inaccessible due to the interaction limitations of the iphone. and of course, all java and active x based sites are unusable as well. but well-designed web sites tend to be pretty easily usable.

but until today, web pages often have been designed with some (and often too many) assumptions about the clients, assuming that clients will be standard browsers running on standard computers. many developers even went so far to take certain screen sizes or client-side technologies (such as flash) for granted. the iphone changes that, in Optimizing Web Applications and Content for the iPhone, apple basically describes the areas where the iphone deviates from the current web client mainstream. the most important areas are user interaction (touch screen instead of mouse) and the lack of flash.

flash-based sites never were and never will be real web content. flash violates basic web architecture principles and has mainly been used by designers who don't understand the web, want to work based on a convenient closed-world assumption, and can get away with this because they have project managers who don't understand the web as well. flash's inaccessibility has often been put aside as a minority problem raised by overzealous standards nerds. with the advent of flash-less mobile clients, however, it will become more apparent that it makes more sense to publish web content using web technologies, rather than to make adobe rich.

and very likely content providers running flash-based web sites will soon be able to see that an increasing number of requests are coming in from iphones, then leaving the site instantaneously. i hope that google analytics and similar services and tools will very soon make that behavior as easily recognizable as possible, so that it becomes apparent that flash actually hurts a web site's impact.

well, announcing the death of flash certainly has quite a bit of wishful thinking on my part to it, but at the very least the iphone will make even the most clueless project manager reconsider some of the design-happy flash-based web sites which are still often being marketed as a smart way of building a web site.

"announcing the death of flash certainly has quite a bit of wishful thinking on my part to it"

And why would that be? Perhaps the same cluelessness you accuse others of? Certainly a statement like "flash-based sites never were and never will be real web content" makes you sound so.

Flash isn't FOSS, but being freely available and virtually ubiquitous it has a place on the web where - believe it or not - being design-happy also has a place, not at the expense of user interaction but as its complement. Now we developers can finally mimic the behaviours we've always enjoyed in Flash through DHTML and XmlHttpRequest - drag-and-drop, dynamic page updating, etc - but only at long last, and, as usual, subject to the vagaries of browser implementation. (Oh yeah... and only when JavaScript is enabled). If you feel that this kind of feedback is also "99% bad" because it transcends the limitations of basic web architecture then we'll have to agree to disagree.

In any case surely flash is better positioned to adapt to the new interaction paradigm than plain HTML?

When you are talking about web, you are actually talking about html. But html and web are two different things, right? Stateless html client is usable for a lot of things, but not for all, and by my opinion it is just one (first) step in evolution of web. Flash is there for pushing boundaries further and hopefully there will be also other technologies available (Silverlight, JavaFX,...). I think apple made mistake with iPhone and as they said they will put Flash into next update. Hopefully. Erik, just don't swim in the opposite direction of the river flow :)
BR Milan

I have a number of blind friends who would actually be delighted if Flash were to die. It's one of the major no-nos that make websites inaccessible for them, dependent as they are on screen-reading software (Mac OS X-Voiceover / Windows-JAWS) and/or Braille displays. Of course a device such as the iPhone isn't useful for them either, but if it forces site designers to adhere to better accessibility standards, they will be indirect beneficiaries of iPhone proliferation nonetheless.

I can't help but lol at the idea that Flash and Java aren't included for some kind of "good practice" or "accessible web" reasons, or because they are "bad web practice".

So, what's your alternative to something like YouTube which hasn't been blessed by some official Application to enable the Flash/FLV content to be played without Flash?

Hmm, maybe you could embed a Windows Media Player? Yeah, right, like Apple will let MS write an ActiveX plugin.... Silverlight? Moonlight? Same deal... there must be multimedia technology which you can embed into a webpage.... something that will work with iPhone right out of the box... oh yeah! Quicktime! The real dead duck of the internet world, the one plugin I would never let anywhere near my computer, as the last time I downloaded it installed itself into my start-up list, added tray icons and a ton of background processes and was bundled with a heap of stuff I didn't want.

Now, please can you explain to me why using Flash to develop multimedia apps is bad web practice and using QuickTime to do the same thing isn't?

Bad practice is telling customers what they want, and not the customers telling you.

Sorry, Flash is here to stay and will soon be on your iPhone. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder about Flash, so I won't argue about whether or not there is "real content" in Flash or whether everyone who uses it doesn't "understand the web". Let me know when Flash actually dies so I can start looking for another job. :)

What are you like an amish guy how makes web sites? Besides where did you get this report from, the bush administion? The bottom line is if any one in "Multimedia" gave a sh!t about your opinion, you would be the first they throw it at. Though that's assuming people haven't all ready been throwing fecal matter at you.

Why stop at Flash? What about those poor sods that are stuck with 300 baud TTY modem links to the world? Just imagine how compromised they are by all that bandwidth sucking HTML gibberish. Has anyone given even the slightest consideration to these folks?

And then there are the poor folks that are still scratching out markings on clay tablets …

When will the insanity of progress end? Ahhh, the good old days of basic grunts and groans!!

I don't understand why Flash haters are so adamament about 'basic web principles'. Basic web principles (like static pages and back buttons)are essentially founded in severe technological limitations. I don't understand why basic web principles should be regarded in any favorable light. At their core they are the antithesis of basic usability principles found in every modern OS, device and pretty much anything that is meant to interact with a human. Would you consider it a superior interface if your file browser had to leave it's current view, go into a new window then return back to the previous window to complete the simple task of renaming a single file? Forget drag and drop, I'm sure you think that putting a check box beside every single file and a link at the top that says 'move checked files' which brings you to a new page were file locations are manually entered into a form is much superior. My point is that these things you call 'basic web principles' are nothing more than a series of compromises which where made because it wasn't technically feasable to implement the superior interface methods of every modern GUI.

george: thanks for your comment. insisting of "basic web principles" to be followed is not just a bone-headed hobby of some old-fashioned people who tragically missed the trend towards graphical interfaces. i do get a lot of these responses (and i really liked the comment saying "are you some amish guy designing web pages?"), and there is that trend to picture adherence to architectural principles as stupid fundamentalism, basically turning me into a taliban of the web. but i think there are very good and compelling reasons to take web architecture seriously (and other people obviously think otherwise).

for me the important point is that the web is an information system, not just a transport infrastructure. it has been designed for open information exchange in a loosely coupled environment and is good at that and is successful because of that. the ui principles you are mentioning are platform issues which are highly successful ways of building applications on one platform, but these two things should no be confused. if they are, you end up building platform apps (for windows, flash, or apollo or whatever), and any attempt to really integrate that app's data and functionality into the web can become very hard.

so i think looking at the web's basics as some old-fashioned thing that soon will be replaced by something superior such as (( insert your favorite ria platform here )) is ignoring the difference between an information system and apps, but i may be proven wrong. (( insert your favorite ria platform here )) might take over the world very soon. my guess, however, is that (( insert your favorite ria platform here )) is just another way of (( insert the company marketing your favorite ria platform here )) trying to make sure that they get the lock-in that they need.

I can't believe how puerile and inane these comments are - specially considering how insightful and well-written your article is.

But I guess it's understandable when you consider that these people are all Flash developers who have invested years of their lives in a closed-source environment that will eventually become redundant.

You guys need to face facts: the growing sophistocation of the average web user now regard Flash as a nuisance. Besides Flash video, which is basically why Flash is still around, Flash is used in only the most obnoxious and pointless applications - banner ads, annoying advertising popups, and gratuitous and pretentious "designy" sites.